University was built is the traditional
territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples, many of whom
continue to live and work here today. This territory is covered by the Upper
Canada Treaties and is within the land protected by the Dish with One Spoon wampum
agreement. Today, this gathering place is home to First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples. It's
a great honour for us at McMaster University, the Centre for Scholarship in the Public Interest,
and the Wilson Institute for Canadian History to welcome Noam Chomsky here this evening. Dr.
Chomsky will present a 30-minute talk titled "Rethinking the Civic Imagination and Manufactured
Ignorance in the Post Pandemic World", followed by an interview with Dr. Ian McKay, the L. R.
Wilson Chair in Canadian History that will draw from Dr. Chomsky's recent book, "The Precipice:
Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change." Throughout his entire academic
life, Noam Chomsky has used his knowledge, skills, and stature as a public intellectual to
advocate for radical social and economic changes in societies that have failed to live up to the
promises and ideals of a socially just society. Professor Chomsky has rightly argued
that intellectuals, artists, educators, cultural workers, and others have a responsibility
to address grave social problems such as the threat of nuclear war, ecological devastation, and
the sharp deterioration of democracy. He is well aware that oppression feeds on mass apathy and
manufactured ignorance. In response, his academic work and public interventions have become a model
for enriching public life and addressing economic inequality, needless wars in class, and racial
injustices. He has worked tirelessly to inspire individuals in social movements to unleash the
energy, the insights, and the passion necessary to keep alive the spirit, promises and ideals of
a radical democracy. As a public intellectual and border crosser, he draws upon a wide variety of
disciplinary fields, pushes at the frontiers of the public imagination while reminding us
of the need to feel and act upon a passion for a commitment to a free, just, and equal
society. He rightly insists that in the end there is no democracy without informed citizens and no
justice without a language critical of injustice. He has made clear that we live in dangerous
times and that there's an urgent need for more individuals, institutions, and social movements
to come together in the belief that the current regimes of tyranny can be resisted, that
alternative futures are possible, and that acting on those beliefs through collective
resistance will enable social change to happen. Professor Chomsky's work is infused with a
vision that merges a sense of moral outrage with the need for civic courage and collective
action. His work is more indispensable than ever because the world is more dangerous than ever. I
believe that the great playwright Arthur Miller captures the spirit of Noam's work when he wrote,
"writers speak the unspeakable and the closer you get to it, the more real it is, which is part of
making life possible for those who come after." It is my great honour to introduce Professor
Chomsky, an international treasure and one of the world's most important scholars and
critically engaged public intellectuals. He has written numerous books including one of
his most recent, "Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance", which
I am now using in class, and he currently teaches at the University of Arizona. It is my great
pleasure to welcome Professor Noam Chomsky. Thank you very much, Henry. Well in
the preliminary discussions we've had, many very searching questions have been
posed. I would like to try to touch on them, inadequately of course, as a way of setting
the stage for thinking about it and discussion. Well perhaps I can start with something that
sounds quite remote. You probably know about the Fermi paradox posed by the great physicist
Enrico Fermi. It's very brief. The paradox is: where are they? His discipline of astrophysics
demonstrates that there's a vast number of planets accessible to us with conditions similar enough
to Earth so that they should be able to support life, over time intelligent life, maybe even super
intelligent life. So where are they? With the most diligent search we cannot find the slightest hint
of their existence. Well, one answer that's been offered in a morbid gist is that they're out there
but when they come across humans they decided to get away from that crazy place as quickly as
possible. Could see some justification for that. Another answer in the same vein but more serious
is that intelligent life in fact developed but proved to be a lethal notation and
quickly destroyed itself. Actually we know of only one case: humans on Earth. We are a new
species, only a few hundred thousand years old. That's a blink of an eye in evolutionary time and
we seem to be intent on establishing the thesis. There have been reasons for such
suspicions since August 1945 when we learned that human intelligence had
devised the means for self-annihilation. Not quite yet but it was clear that the day was not
far off when technology would reach that point. And it did. It came a few years later in 1953
when the United States and then the Soviet Union exploded thermonuclear weapons. In acknowledgment
of this achievement of human intelligence, the hands of the famous doomsday clock which seems
to encapsulate the world's security situation, the hands were advanced to two minutes
to midnight. Midnight is termination. Well, the hands have oscillated since. They
did not reach two minutes to midnight again until halfway through the Trump
administration. In its final years, the analysts abandoned minutes altogether, shifted
to seconds. We're now at 100 seconds to midnight. Let's take a closer look at what leads to these
conclusions. We are currently facing a confluence of severe crises, something that has never
happened before, anything like this in the brief period of human history. To each of these crises,
we know of feasible solutions. In each case, we are rejecting the solutions and racing to the
precipice, some of us more rapidly than others. To be more precise, it is not we who are racing to
the precipice. Rather, it is those whom Adam Smith called the "masters of mankind". In his day, that
was the merchants and manufacturers of England. In our day, it's multinational corporations,
financial institutions, other concentrations of private power, and the governments that
are in no small measure at their service. On the matter of service to the masters,
evidence is compelling. Illustrative cases are regularly on the front pages. Right now
for example, as you know, the US Congress is now debating a major program which among other things
may be the last chance for the United States to take serious steps to arrest catastrophic
global warming. The fate of this measure is largely in the hands of the Chairman of the
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, who happens to be the champion of the Congress
in receiving funds from fossil fuel industries. He's now demanding sole jurisdiction in the Senate
over the 150 billion dollars clean electricity performance programs. That's Joe Manchin and
he can get what he wants. The Senate is split. Republicans half are a hundred percent
opposed to dealing with the climate crisis so the fate of the legislation rests on unity
among Democrats. The chief recipient of fossil fuel funding, the Democrat, can ensure that
nothing will be done to harm his donors and he's clear about it. His official
position is innovation but no elimination, no cut back on fossil fuel use. That's
straight from the handbook of the ExxonMobil public relations department. If the denialist
party returns to power next year as they will may, we'll be back to racing to the abyss as
quickly as possible, picking up from the disastrous Trump years. Well it may seem like
this is an aberration, just one case. It's not. And the history is revealing. The Republicans
were not always a denialist party. In 2008 when John McCain was running,
they were moving towards mild, insufficient but mild, global warming legislation. That their shift to total commitment to cataclysm
results directly from fossil fuel funding. Specifically, juggernaut by the huge Koch brothers
energy conglomerate when it sensed signs that the Republicans were veering towards recognizing
that we are destroying the prospects for civil survival of organized human life on Earth and
harming short-term profits for the masters. The juggernaut was successful. Cut the heresy
off completely, decisively. All Republicans turned and haven't changed. Now that's not an
aberration either. A good deal of research in mainstream academic political science which
has demonstrated a remarkably close correlation between electability and campaign funding.
Specifically, strategic business-based campaign funding. And similar scholarship has independently
established the immediate corollary of this, namely a large majority of voters are
literally unrepresented. There is no correlation between their views and the votes of
their representatives. The representatives are listening to different voices as they must if they
hope to be re-elected. Well it's called democracy. Blocking of legislation that would harm the
fossil fuel industry is not a malady specific to the United States. It's worldwide. In fact,
let's consider what's happening right now again on the front pages. As we meet, governments of
the world are pressuring oil producers to increase production. They've just been advised in the
August IPCC report, by far the most dire yet, that catastrophe is looming unless we begin immediately
to reduce fossil fuel use year by year, effectively phasing it out by mid-century.
Petroleum industry journals are euphoric about the discovery of new fields to exploit
as demand for oil increases. The business press debates whether the US fracking industry
or OPEC is best placed to increase production. You can readily add examples from where you're
sitting. That's some of these pages now. They all know that they are racing to catastrophe.
We don't have to instruct them, they know it very well. Furthermore, at least if they're minimally
literate, they all know that there are feasible solutions to the climate crisis which will
furthermore create a more livable world. But profit for the rich and political
expediency come first. Come first, that is, for the masters and their servants. What about the
general population? Well that's a complex story. Let's take Joe Manchin's state, West Virginia,
coal mining state. Not long ago it was a bastion of working-class militancy. The
United Mine Workers representing the coal miners in West Virginia and elsewhere, they
have recently adopted a program, a transition program, that would shift production towards
renewable energy with better jobs and better lives all feasible, worked out in detail.
But those are people, not the masters. They're a bitter enemy and the relentless class
war conducted by the masters has a different view. The class war, one-sided class war, has been
continuing with mounting intensity in the past 40 years of the neoliberal assault on the
population. That merits a few words. Let's go back to the 1930s, happens to be my childhood.
I remember it very well. The world was facing serious crises. There were several ways
out. Continental Europe turned to fascism. In the United States, a rising militant
working class with a sympathetic president turned to social democracy, the New Deal. Later,
post-war Europe moved in the same direction. That led to what in Europe is called the
Trente Glorieuses, 30 glorious years, and what economists call the golden age of capitalism in
the United States. Fastest growth rate in history, egalitarian growth rate, lowest quintile as
well as the highest quintile. Plenty of flaws but economically, socially has enormous success.
The business world resisted from the first moment. But until the 1970s, they were unable to reverse
the course. By the late 1970s under Carter in the United States, the business
offensive was making progress. In 1978, the president of the United Auto
Workers, Doug Fraser, withdrew from a Carter-initiated management labor board. He
withdrew and condemned the business leaders, I'm quoting him, "for having chosen to
wage a one-sided class war in this country, a war against working people, the
unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young, and the very old, and even
many in the middle class of our society." And having broken and discarded
the fragile unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and
progress, the New Deal years, the golden age under Reagan and Packard, early 80s, the one-sided class
war took off full steam. The first acts were to smash unions using illegal methods like strike
records, opening the door to the corporate sector, inviting them to follow suit. Very effective over
the years, severely weakened the unions. They understood or at least their planners understood
that it was imperative to deprive working people of the main means of defence against what
was to come. And for those with eyes open, what was to come was never in doubt. And go
back to Reagan's inaugural dress. His main principle which he stated is the government is
the problem, not the solution, meaning decisions have to be taken out of the hands of government.
They don't disappear. They go somewhere else. They go to concentrations of private power. That's
a great advantage. The government has a flaw, it's partially responsive to the general
population. Concentrated private power is totally unaccountable so it's a much
better basis for decision making. This was amplified by the economic guru of
the neoliberal assault, Milton Friedman. He came out with his principles article, giving
his credo. Corporations have no responsibility to the public, only to maximizing profit, and of
course salaries for management. But the right to incorporate is a gift granted by the public with
lots of benefits. If you don't want the gift, you can keep it a partnership. But having accepted
the gift, corporations have no responsibility. So, put that together. Decisions
are shifted from the government, partially responsive to the population,
to unaccountable private tyrannies which have no accountability and are responsible
only for maximizing their own profit and the salaries of CEOs and management. Doesn't take
a genius to figure out what's going to happen and in fact after 40 years even the mainstream
institutions are starting to take a look. So the super respectable RAND
corporation, quasi-governmental, recently did a study of what they politely call
the transfer of wealth from the middle class and the working class, lower 90 percent of the
population, transfer of wealth to them to the very top. When you look closely, it's mostly to
the top fraction of one percent of the population. Their estimate is about 50 trillion dollars in
40 years. It's not small change and it's a vast underestimate. They did not take into account
the other means of robbing the public that were developed when Reagan and Thatcher opened the
spigot and said "rob as much as you like". So you're looking at the newspapers today, you
can read about the Pandora Papers, huge trove of papers showing how the ultra rich use various
gimmicks that were illegal prior to Reagan to stash away huge amounts of money in
places where they don't have to pay taxes. It's only a small part of it. The world's
largest corporation, trillion dollar corporation, has its offices in Ireland, very low
tax rates. Others play the same game. Now all of this was illegal prior to Reagan and it
was the law, it was enforced. Treasury department was conscientious in enforcing the laws. There
are many other similar devices, shell companies, changes in rules of corporate governance
so that CEOs can pick the board that picks, that sets their salaries, and guess what
happens from that? Of course that lifts salaries have skyrocketed, especially in the
United States, that carries all management salaries up with it. So you get if you added up
probably 70-80 trillion dollars of robbery of the public, putting most of it in the hands of the
top fraction of one percent. In fact the top 0.1 percent of the US population has increased
their wealth from 10% to 20% of the total. Not quite at that extreme elsewhere but something
like it. Perfectly obvious consequence of the policies that were announced in 1980. Meanwhile
for the general population, stagnation or decline. Up until the late 70s, the minimum wage and
the real wage tracked productivity. That ended with the neoliberal assault. Productivity
and growth increased, the wages stagnate. Real wages in the United States, some supervisory
workers, are actually less than they were in 1979. Meanwhile, services have been cut back under
the principle that government is the problem. A majority of the population pretty
much lives from paycheck to paycheck, can't pay for COVID vaccinations, too much
of a copay, cutback of other services, precarious existence. Maybe you'll be called to
work next week, maybe not. Maybe you'll be called for double time. Okay. That's the result of 40
years of sheer highway robbery. Now the claim is this has to do with markets. Not quite. What
has been created is what economists call a bailout economy. One of the things that was
done under Reagan was to deregulate, including deregulation of the greatly expanding financial
institutions. That immediately leads to crashes. What happens after a crash? The public politely
comes and bails you out. And that's a fraction of it. The government has a tacit insurance
policy, it's called "too big to fail". That means that the big guys, the big financial
institutions, the big banks, and so on can get cheap credit. They can take out risky loans
which are profitable. If anything goes wrong, no problem. That's the bailout economy. So
it's markets for the poor and the working class and the middle class, but it's powerful
government intervening constantly for the rich. That's a one-sided class war. Working people in
the poor are to suffer the ravages of the market. The masters have to be protected by a powerful
state. Many other ways. Clinton joined in one way with what are ludicrously called free trade
agreements, which are radically protectionist in a manner that has absolutely no precedent. It's
why the prices of drugs go sky high, most of the world can't get vaccines, protected by the rich
countries, mainly Europe in this case, but have to preserve the profits of the masters with a
highly interventionist radically protectionist global and local system except for the poor,
the working class and the middle class. They are thrown on the market. Go across the channel,
the Atlantic to Thatcher. It was the same. Her mantra as you remember was: there is
no society. You survive somehow on your own unless of course you're among the
masters, then there's a very rich society. Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable,
American Legislative Exchange Council, corporate-funded which imposes business-friendly
programs in state legislatures which are easily manipulated and bought off, trade associations,
and more. So rich society for the masters, nothing for the rest. One-sided class
war. Well the consequences have been profound. That's quite apart from the vast highway
robbery of the public. The assault has engendered anger, resentment, conspiracy theories about
hidden powers that are causing your malaise, anti-vaxx movements, the United States literally
killing hundreds of thousands of people and a lot more. It's also created fertile terrain for
demagogues of the Trump variety who are capable of holding up a banner with one hand
saying "I'm your protector, I love you", while the other hand stabs you in the back.
There's been one legislative achievement of the Trump administration: the tax scam of 2017.
Sheer robbery. Sharp cutback of taxes for the rich corporations, imposing of course a higher
tax burden on everyone else. But that's kind of quiet. You don't talk about that in public.
There have also been a sharp attack on democracy. It's an obvious consequence of policies I
described. Steps towards a kind of proto-fascism or all the way some analysts argue. Well there
are very sober and respected voices sounding the alarm about the possible collapse of American
democracy with dire consequences for the world. Among them are leading commentators of the world's
leading business press, the London Financial Times, to warn that the United States is being
driven to autocracy or worse by what they call a radical party with a reactionary agenda which
ranks alongside the far-right European parties with neo-fascist origins. Should say that all
of this is tragically ironic for people whose lives have been framed by the transition from the
1930s with the US in the lead in social democracy to tpday where it's in the lead and moving towards
proto-fascism. Well that's a bird's eye view of where I think we are now. It's not graven in
stone. Plenty of counter forces. On climate, most crucial issue, it's mainly the young. It's
a terrible indictment of my generation when Greta Thundberg stands up at an assembly of the
masters at Davos and says, "you betrayed us". She was right. The words should be seared into our
conscience. It's not too late but we do not have much time to hear these words. Well,
that's the crisis of global heating, which is actually one aspect of a much broader
environmental crisis, habitat destruction, industrialized agriculture, destroying the
land, much else, which feeds directly into the COVID crisis, incidentally. But
let's turn to a different crisis, a comparable one, the one that was initiated 75
years ago, the threat of nuclear war now growing very seriously. One of the reasons why the
doomsday clock is moving to seconds not minutes. There have been slow steps for 60
years towards an arms control regime that would limit the threat of nuclear war. It
has been virtually dismantled by this century's radical party with a reactionary agenda, the
Republican party. George W. Bush took time off from invading countries to destroy the ABM
Treaty. Trump's wrecking ball took care of most of the rest, though Biden was able to rescue the
New START Treaty hours before it was to expire, accepting finally Russian offers to extend
it. The US is of course far in the lead in global military power, swamps all potential
adversaries combined. It's also well ahead in the mad race to develop even more
dangerous weapons and to extend the yearning for global suicide to space.
The US has incomparable security. It's not the way it's perceived in high places.
Threats everywhere, gravest perceived threat to the US is China. That deserves some thought.
The China threat is very well described by the distinguished international diplomat Paul
Keating, former prime minister of Australia, right within the reach of the dragon's claws.
I'll quote his words. The threat of china is the fact that somehow the rise of 20% of
humanity from abject poverty into something approaching a modern state is illegitimate.
But more than that, by its mere presence, it is an affront to the United States. It's not
that China presents a threat to the United States, something China has never articulated
or delivered. Rather, its mere presence represents a challenge to United
States preeminence. Hard to deny. The major point of contention right now is
freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, or that's the way it's described. It's
not accurate. It's accurately described by a leading Australian strategic analyst Clinton
Fernandes. As he explains, the conflict concerns military and intelligence operations in
China's exclusive economic zone, which extends 200 miles offshore for every country. The United
States holds that military intelligence operations are permissible in these exclusive zones.
China holds they're not permissible. India agrees with China's interpretation.
Recently, it vigorously protested US military operations in its exclusive zone. These exclusive
zones were established by the 1982 Law of the Sea. The United States is the only maritime
power not to have ratified the law. It does say that it will not violate it. The law bans the
threat or use of force in the exclusive zones. The controversy has nothing to do with freedom of
navigation, which is not threatened in the least. It has to do with whether military intelligence
operations constitute a threat of force. United States says no. China, India,
others say yes. Well surely this is a clear case where diplomacy is in order, not highly
provocative actions like sending in a naval armada in a region of considerable tension with the
threat of escalation possibly without bounds. But it is crucial to establish US preeminence
everywhere, even off the coast of China, which we are led to believe unlike the US
faces no threats. Surely no threats from the nuclear-armed missiles in the US military
bases off China's coast, among the 800 military bases the United States has
around the world, but China has one. The nature of the China threat is further elaborated by
Australia's preeminent military correspondent, Brian Toohey. It's worth quoting in detail to help
understand world affairs so listen, I'll quote it. "China's nuclear weapons are so inferior that it
couldn't be confident of deterring a retaliatory strike from the United States. Take the example
of nuclear-powered, missile-armed submarines. China has four. Each can carry 12
missiles, each with a single warhead. The subs are easy to detect because
they're noisy. According to the US Office of Naval Intelligence, each is noisier
than a Soviet submarine first launched in 1976. China is expected to acquire another four
that are a little bit quieter by 2030. However, the missiles on those subs won't have
the range to reach the continental United States, they would have to reach suitable
locations in the Pacific Ocean. However, they're effectively bottled up inside
the South China Sea. To escape, they'd have to pass through a series of US chokepoints where they
could easily be sunk by US hunter killer nuclear submarines. In contrast to China, the United
States has 14 Ohio-class missile-armed subs. Each can launch 24 Trident missiles, each
containing eight independently targetable warheads able to reach anywhere on the globe. That means
a single US submarine can destroy 192 cities, or other targets, compared to 12 for the Chinese
submarine. The Ohio class is now being replaced by the bigger and more devastating Columbia
class." Well in order to break this imbalance, the US is now sending Australia advanced hunter
killer nuclear subs which Australia will pay for so they'll be incorporated in the US naval command
. This sale of advanced nuclear subs abrogates an agreement between France and Australia for
sale of conventional subs. It's a serious blow to French industry. Washington did not even take
the trouble to notify France. It was instructing the European Union on its place in the
US global order. US runs global orders. Brian Toohey observes further that
Australia's submission to the United States does not enhance its security, quite the contrary,
and further points out that the nuclear subs sale has no discernible strategic purpose.
The subs will not even be operational for probably 15 years, by which time china will
surely have expanded its military forces to deal with this new military threat. The
sub agreement does serve a purpose however to establish more firmly that the United States
intends to rule the world even if that requires escalating the threat of war, possibly terminal
nuclear war, in a highly volatile region, and of course eschewing such specified measures as
diplomacy. Well these steps to escalate conflict take place against the background that's plain and
stark. The United States inherited the mantle of global dominance from Britain and proceeded to
substantially extend its reach far more powerful than Britain ever was. China's a rising power
bound to play a major role in world affairs. The crises we face are all international. Pandemics,
destruction of the environment know no borders, nor does nuclear war. The US and China will
either cooperate in addressing these crises or we are doomed. It's as simple as that. Cooperation is
surely achievable just as the other crises we face have solutions that are within reach. The
question we face now is whether we have the will to save ourselves from cataclysm or whether
we will choose to show that higher intelligence really may be a lethal mutation, providing
an unhappy answer to Fermi's paradox. Thank you very much, Dr. Chomsky
and I just want to repeat what Henry Giroux said in his introduction. It's
a great honour to welcome you to McMaster and to the Wilson Institute. And after I pose
my questions to you, we shall select a few from audience members as well. And while I'm asking
my questions, audience members can pose them starting now using the chat function on YouTube.
So my questions tonight are all based on your 2021 book, "The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic
and the Urgent Need for Social Change", brought out by C. J. Polychroniou. In it, you elaborate on
the confluence of crises of extraordinary severity with the fate of the human experiment quite
literally at stake. So here are my six questions. First of all, among some theorists critical of
capitalism, there's been a recovery of a theme developed by Marx which is called the metabolic
rift, the way capitalism systematically depletes nature of elements necessary for the
planet's equilibrium. For such theorists, there aren't distinct climate
change and pandemic crises plural, but rather one overall multi-dimensional
environmental crisis stemming from the disastrous impact of capitalism upon the natural world. Do
you consider this a promising line of inquiry? Oh yeah, I had that question in mind which was
sent to me when I hinted at the fact briefly that the global warming is part of a much broader
environmental crisis. That's the metabolic rift. Destruction of habitats, which of course
enhances pandemics, industrialized agriculture, industrialized meat production, not only
savage and brutal but a huge effect on global warming and even more, something else I didn't
mention. One of the crises that we're facing, not talked about much except in the medical
literature, is antibiotic resistant bacteria. We're coming to a point where going to a hospital
is becoming dangerous because there are bacteria mutating which antibiotics can't deal with.
Well the drug companies don't much work on that, it's not really profitable, but they're mounting.
And the reason they're mounting, one major reason, is industrialized meat production. You cram cows,
chickens in impossible circumstances in a tight place. Diseases are going to spread. Well you're
a good capitalist, you want to maximize profit. So what you do is pump them full of antibiotics.
A huge proportion of the antibiotics that are used are used basically for that reason. Of
course the antibiotics lead to mutation, pretty soon you're getting antibiotic resistant
microorganisms. Could be, it's been warned that in another 20 or 30 years,
surgery may be impossible and other advanced medical procedures but you have
to make money tomorrow. That's crucial. Doesn't matter what you do to the world's population, to
the huge number of species that we're destroying, to animals, to the environment - have to make
profit tomorrow. And this generalizes. So yes it's a very profitable line of inquiry but
we have to remember something. Time scales. That's critical. The crises that we face have
to be dealt with today. It's today that the leading democracies are urging the fossil fuel
companies to increase production when the leaders all know certainly that we have to start
decreasing production if we hope to survive, but not if you want to improve your electoral
prospects or make more profit for the drug companies. That has to be done now. We
can't wait for the capitalist system to be replaced by something more humane, just concerned
with people's needs instead of profit. Can't wait for that and that's true of the other crises
too. All of them have to be dealt with quickly. We're on the verge. I don't have to go
through the details, it's pretty obvious. They have to be dealt with now. That means working
to modify the more destructive aspects of the savage capitalism of the past 40 years. It's not
utopian to say that we could go back to the kind of capitalism that Dwight Eisenhower advocated.
It's not super utopian. In the United States, it's not utopian to say that we could rise to
the level of the conservative party in Germany. That's not a joke. Take a look at Bernie Sanders'
programs. One of the editors of the Financial Times quipped that in Germany he could be
running on the Christian Democrat program. It's literally true. Universal health care,
free higher education, all over the place, Mexico, Germany, Finland, everywhere
you look. But for the United States, that's considered radical. That's part of the
extraordinary power of business in the United States which has shifted the spectrum,
has fought against the New Deal bitterly, shifted the spectrum far to the right. Well
that's not utopian to say we can overcome that. In fact, it's being battled right now in
Congress. Right now, the Biden programs would move a little bit towards, back towards the kind
of more moderate capitalism of earlier years. Some limited social democracy being fought
tooth and nail 100% by the Republican party and by the so-called moderate Democrats who
should be called reactionary Democrats, the ones who are awash in corporate funding. They'll
probably kill it. That's maybe the last chance to do that. So we have to solve the problems within
the existing system. Meanwhile we can be working hard to raise understanding, awareness of the
deep flaws in the system that have to be overcome and also developing institutions which
are the seeds of some better society. Worker-managed enterprises, for example,
cooperatives which do flourish in Canada, not here, localism and so on, all at the same
time. But the time scale can't be overlooked. Thank you. One distinctive theme I really
appreciated in The Precipice and in your comments tonight and I think it sets you apart from a lot
of other leftists is your sort of sympathetic, compassionate treatment of working-class North
Americans who are tempted by conspiracy theories and right-wing demagogues. You really are
saying that in a sense they have some cause to be aggrieved and they're sort of being lured into
a trap by a, you know, supremely capable con man. How would you respond to critics who might think
you're being too soft on grassroots Trumpians and their reactionary politics? Well I don't feel that I'm on some high
moral pedestal in which I can condemn other people. I'm not living their lives. I didn't
have to suffer the precarity of existence, the stagnation of wages, the decline of
services that they suffered. I'm privileged, okay. I mean problems like I suffer from the
health system like I've had the problem of not being able to get to a hospital because
they're overflowing with unvaccinated COVID victims. But that's not like what
poor and working people suffer. The last 40 years have been a disaster for them.
And it's the same in England. I mean I think the working class vote for Brexit in my
view is suicide but you can understand it. They want to grasp something. Maybe we can grasp
the fact that we can use British currency again. We can feel proud of something. I don't think
that's very smart but you can understand it and i don't feel like condemning it. If you take a look
at the Trump voters here in the United States, that's been very carefully studied.
The best work is by Tony DiMaggio, left social scientist who's done very detailed
work. Turns out that the prime base for the Trump popular base is petty bourgeois. Relatively
affluent small businessmen, insurance salesmen, guys who own a construction business,
rural, Christian, white supremacist, traditional. They feel their country's being
taken away from them by minorities. There's even a theory of the great replacement. The
democrats are trying to get immigrants here so they can undermine the white population.
The great replacement, that's one of the wild conspiracy theories that's around. Well take
a look at, take a trip through rural America. You can understand it. Jobs are gone.
Factories are gone. Young people are leaving. Stores are boarded up and
maybe the bank is boarded up. Still some churches. Not much future for
you. It's declining. It's an elderly, Christian nationalist, traditional,
white supremacist population. There was a wonderful, that's largely mythical,
but there's at least a myth about a wonderful traditional life where the coloured people
knew their place, women knew their place, none of this craziness of same-sex marriage,
other things that these terrible minorities are doing to us. All being taken away. So okay
in those circumstances oh march on the capitol, these are the people who marched on the capitol.
Not working people. These are the people who marched there saying I'm going to save my country
by taking back Congress away from the people destroying the country. Do I approve of it? Of
course not. But I think we can understand it and we could also understand our role in creating it.
We tolerated 40 years of the neoliberal assault okay. It has a devastating effect on the
victims. We're in no position to condemn them as deplorable. They are, but not without reason.
So that's the way i feel about it. Incidentally, it's not basically working class. One of the
things that he showed in his work, DiMaggio, Tony DiMaggio, is that the working class was not won
by the Republicans. It was lost by the Democrats. That's where the shift is. Many of the
Trump working class voters voted for Obama. He totally betrayed them, totally. So what
are they supposed to do? In fact I could see it in Massachusetts where i lived at the time.
Mostly liberal state. 2008 Obama was elected, wonderful promises. 2010 he'd betrayed the working
class totally by the way he handled the bailout for the rich, not for the poor, not for the
victims. By 2010 there was a by-election. Replaced Ted Kennedy, the liberal lion. Even
union workers didn't vote for the Democrat. They'd been betrayed, stabbed in the back. Why
should we vote for these guys? They're just a party of rich professionals. They don't care
about us. Well that's the way you lose voters. I wonder if I could ask a question about
what you call the neoliberal assault. This phenomenon known as neoliberalism which we're
studying closely at the Institute and we have several good graduate students working on this,
but they're really suggesting to me that there are these various ways of defining neoliberalism. Some
of them saying it's an all-encompassing logic of rule, others say it's just a specific tradition,
a school of economics, the Chicago school. Some see it as a particular version of a
globalized trade regime and others see it as an updated version of ruling class strategies
to rob the working class essentially. Would I be right then in thinking that you know from
your comments tonight and the book that are you essentially inclined to that last thrust which
is it's a new variant of a perennial ruling class scheme to basically deprive workers and you know
it's very much a class-based attack on working class more than the other themes that other
scholars are raising or would you like to put them all these strands of interpretation together and
have a tilt towards a class-based interpretation? I'd go along with Doug Fraser when it
was taking off. So one-sided class war. The business classes are basically Marxists, vulgar Marxists, they don't bring the
sophistication to it. But they're fighting a bitter one-sided class war using many techniques.
None of this has to do with the Chicago school. That's cover. Chicago school doesn't say you
should have highly protectionist trade agreements which you call free trade agreements. Chicago
school doesn't say you should bail out the big institutions and give them a government
insurance policy so they can be predatory. That's not Chicago school. And Milton
Friedman, I'm sure knows it. This is when Milton Friedman actually should notice that
the Chicago school had a chance. They had a chance under perfect experimental conditions
in the first 9/11. We don't call it 9/11. 9/11 1973, much worse than 9/11 2001, but since we
were the perpetrators it's not in history. Well, imposed a vicious brutal dictatorship, opened
the door, huge amount of funds flowing in, investors loved it. Working class was crushed,
popular dissent was crushed. The Chicago boys came in. Milton Friedman's students, Friedrich
Hayek, all the big shots. Ran the economy, perfect conditions, couldn't have any protest,
the torture chambers took care of that. He had money pouring in from the wealthy all over the
world, the international financial institutions. They were smart enough to depart from doctrine by
keeping intact the nationalized copper company, Codelco. Highly efficient nationalized copper
company which was in fact the base of the economy. So they put away the textbook and left that in
place. Absolutely perfect conditions. Within about five years, they had crashed the economy
totally. The government had to take over more of the economy than it held under Allende. 1982
Wags called it "the Chicago road to socialism". But they didn't care. By 1982, they were on
to bigger game. Let's take the whole world. Let's take the whole world and put
it under our one-sided class war masquerading as libertarianism. So I think that's
a good definition of neoliberalism. Define it by its practices not its rhetoric and the practices
were perfectly obvious from the beginning. I really like what you said about Brexit
and about American working class people wanting to believe in their nation and kind
of gut patriotism. In Canada, I think some of our nationalism derives from taking gleeful
pleasure in the troubles of the United States. I really deplore those tendencies and
so I really appreciated your pokes at Canada and you take a few pokes at Canada in The
Precipice, describing our so-so medicare system which is not really a world leader in terms
of its comprehensiveness or sophistication. And also the Alberta tar sands and other
mega projects. So granted that your book is not about Canada, I was wondering do you think
there is a place for progressive nationalism in a future global left and how do we
read it of this kind of need to other nations and to basically dwell upon you know
the schadenfreude, the joys of schadenfreude and watching other nations go through difficult
times? To me, it's a very ethically problematic politics and yet it's everywhere in
Canada. Do you want to comment on that? Well I'm sorry, I don't remember the exact words,
but there was a well-known Canadian diplomat. I think his name might have been John Holmes
or something like that. He once described the Canadian way. The Canadian way is to stand up for
your principles and make sure you violate them. He put it more eloquently. I've seen
the effects of Canadian foreign policy even in my own experience. I've
spent time in southern Colombia, one of the most brutal vicious parts
of the world. Horrible atrocities. Visiting poor villages where they're desperately
trying to preserve their water supplies under the attack of Canadian mining corporations
who want to destroy the virgin forest, the hills, make profit by killing poor people in
Colombia. That's all over the world. They're the scourge of the Earth, Canadian mining companies.
As far as Canadian foreign policy is concerned, attracts the United States. You may recall
Lester Pearson, the Nobel Prize winner. He was one of the revelations in the Pentagon Papers
was that in the negotiations volume, which Dan Ellsberg didn't release at first, when Johnson
was planning to bomb North Vietnam in 1964, he consulted with the allies. So he consulted
with Canada with Lester Pearson. Pearson said he didn't think it would be good to use
atomic weapons but iron bombs would be fine. That's the Canadian way, stand up
for principles, no atomic weapon okay, but bomb the [ __ ] out of them you know and
in fact Canada was serving the United States as basically the US spy in the
international commission there. So there's plenty to say about Canada. By US
standards, it's civilized. It's not very high bar. I really noticed throughout The Precipice
how many times you make implicit but also explicit references to Antonio Gramsci and as a
fledgling Gramscian, I really appreciated that. But I was wondering if you could comment on
a theme that Gramsci develops is the modern prince which he wants basically a cohesive party
aiming to build an effective and inclusive state. Libertarian leftists have historically been
skeptical of any such state socialist project. Yet the pandemic to my eye
seemingly shows the need for states with the capacity to plan the economy,
institute comprehensive social security, and prevent future pandemics. So is it time to set
aside this libertarian skepticism of the state? Well I don't know exactly what
the libertarian skepticism is. Does it say that if you don't feel like stopping
at a red light, you should drive through it? Especially if there's an old woman pushing
a shopping cart there? I don't want to be inhibited. Why should I have the state tell
me I have no right to do that? I haven't heard that from libertarians. There happen to be vaccine
mandates which have been in place for a long time in schools. Can't send your kid to a school unless
he gets a polio vaccine, measles vaccine. So is a libertarian supposed to say I want to send my kid
to school and kill those other kids because i want to be free of state control? I haven't heard
that recently. In fact, the question is not are there general controls. It's who puts them in
place. Is it the community, a democratic community which gets together, deliberates, says we want to
put these in place because it's for our benefit? Well that's libertarian socialism. It's not US
style libertarianism. Right-wing libertarianism, which says private power does whatever it feels
like and the rest of you find a way to survive. It's what was called libertarian socialism,
the libertarian wing of the socialist movement, basically anarchism and ... It had nothing to do
with what's called libertarianism today. Actually an interesting measure of the extent to which
democracy functions in a society is the attitude towards tax collection. It's a very striking
measure. So if you live in a totalitarian state, when tax day comes along, you're furious. They're
robbing you. April 15th in the United States, they're robbing us. I want to find a way out of
it. Suppose you had a democratic society. Imagine a democratic society. A society where communities
get together, decide here's what we want for next year for ourselves, schools, roads, decent air,
water, and so on. Let's figure out how to pay for it. Here's an equitable way to pay for it.
Tax day comes along, it's a day of celebration. It's a day of celebration of the fact that we were
able to work together to get what we all want. Now it's interesting to place
societies in that spectrum. You get an interesting conclusion of
the extent to which democracy functions. It's worth thinking about. So I don't think the
issue is the horrible state is imposing mandates. It's we get together, decide we want to protect
each other, so we decide we want to protect workers in restaurants. I think they deserve
to be protected, so therefore we decide that the restaurant should be able to have a vaccine
mandate. I want to protect them. It has nothing to do with a powerful state imposing anything
else if it's a democratic society of course. My last question is, it's
kind of a general question, but in The Precipice you're asked how one can
fight right-wing authoritarianism and if I can quote you and it's a wonderful quote, you say the
familiar advice, easy to state, hard to follow, but if there's another way it's been kept a
dark secret. Honest, dedicated, courageous, and persistent engagement. Hard work, necessary
work, the kind that has succeeded in the past and can again. So you know I really like the way
that you are balancing a kind of sense of what is possible but how you know urgent and hard the work
is going to be. "Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will" would be how Gramsci would
put it. How best can we combat not just right wing authoritarianism but what I would call kind
of the ambient despair I'm sensing among some of my students, the sense of many young people.
They're just confronting so many interlocking overpowering manifold crises as they inherit
the 21st century world. How best can we sort of combat that sense of almost
nihilistic apocalyptic despair? Well I think several ways. One of them actually
is history. Take a look at what's been achieved by the dedicated work of completely unknown
people. Quote my favourite historian, my old friend Howard Zinn, the unknown people who create,
do the work that creates the basis for the events that enter history. We'll never know their names.
Nobody knows the names of the SNCC workers in 1960 who travelled through Alabama in freedom buses
getting shot at, beaten up, vilified, sometimes killed in order to encourage black farmers to take
their lives in their hands and register to vote. anybody know their names? I personally happen
to know a few of them but that's by accident. Same with everything else. Feminist movement,
environmental movement, everything. And a lot succeed. Look back, just take the United States.
Ask what kind of a country it was in the 1960s before the wave of activism civilized it.
1960s, the United States had anti-miscegenation laws so extreme that the Nazis refused to
accept them. It had federally legislated segregated housing. There was under the New Deal
federal support for public housing. But under the impact of Southern Democrats, had to be racist.
You wouldn't be able to get anything through unless it was segregated. That had a major
effect in the 1950s in the growth period. An African-American man could maybe get a decent
job in an auto plant, make a little money, maybe buy a small house. Property is wealth in
the United States. Couldn't buy a small house. Government said no sorry they're segregated,
it's not for you. You don't go there. There were anti-sodomy laws, of course. Women
had, by law, women were property literally. The US still had the laws that were founded, taken
over by the founders. British common law under which women were property, owned by the father,
handed over to the husband. It wasn't until 1975 that the Supreme Court determined that women were
peers, had a right to serve on federal juries. Well we can go on and on. It was a very different
country before the activism of the 60s. That's why in the general intellectual world, the 60s are
condemned as a time of troubles which disrupted the society. It did. It civilized the society
in many ways. There were things that were wrong. There always are. But overwhelmingly it
basically civilizes society, mainly young people. No tradition coming out of almost nowhere. Picked
up in the 70s. By now, it's all over the place. The climate strike a couple of weeks ago. That's
young people trying to save the world. Well one way to support the idea that we should have
optimism of the will is to look at what's been achieved: a lot. Young people today don't
remember what it was like in the 60s. That's ancient history. We can remember, okay. They
should study it, labor history, the whole story. The other major reason, the second major reason
and that is we do have the answers. There are feasible workable answers to every crisis that we
face. That's important. There's a third reason. You have a choice. You can either give up and make
sure that the worst will happen or you can grasp the opportunities that exist. Maybe it'll make
it a better world. It's not a very hard choice. Thank you. Okay I've got some questions here now from the audience if you
wouldn't mind to take them. Here's one from Eric McPherson. He asks, given
that the masters of mankind will not, what kind of organizing by working people can help to bring
about the kind of international cooperation you mentioned? So I guess what he's asking,
is there a kind of grassroots democratic globalization that can be contrasted to those
that are pursued by the masters of mankind? Well if you take a look at history, history of
countries like ours, it's overwhelmingly the case that the an active militant labor movement
was in the forefront of driving progress. That's why Canada has a national health
system for example and the US doesn't. The labor unions acted differently
on the two sides of the border. The New Deal measures which brought a measure
of social democracy to the United States were later imitated in Europe to an extent. Labor
was in the forefront all the way. In England post-war world was the labor movement. Reagan
and Thatcher knew exactly what they were doing when they initiated an attack on the labor move.
No other way to fight a one-sided class war. But then there's the opposite side of that
coin: rebuild the movement. Can be done. The United States happens to have
a very violent labor history. It's a business-run society to a remarkable extent
but there was a vibrant lively labor movement in the late 19th-early 20th century. Was crushed
by force. Primarily the liberals, incidentally. Woodrow Wilson's Red Scare smashed it. 1920s
almost gone, the 1930s rose from the ashes, started having CIO organizing - this much I can
remember, it's my family in fact - CIO organizing sit down strikes put the fear of god into the
managing classes, sympathetic administration, got some progress. That can happen
again. Furthermore we should remember, it's kind of ancient history, that the labor
unions are mostly called internationals. That can be revived. To some extent,
it is. You had longshoremen boycotting a trade with South Africa under apartheid when the
US government was strongly supporting apartheid. Reagan was the last supporter of the apartheid
regime but the longshoremen were refusing to serve the ships. Okay internationalism for
the labor movement is needed for survival. The neoliberal globalization programs are
designed specifically to sit poor people, poor working people in competition with one another
so you get a race to the bottom. That's Clinton's programs of NAFTA, World Trade Organization
and so on. The labor movement can fight against it. The remnants of the labor movement tried to
in 1990s. They weren't strong enough to combat it but you could have the kind of programs that
the labor movement put forth. High growth, high-wage programs for all participants in all
countries, labor rights and so on. That would be an alternative to the low growth, low
wage policies of neoliberal globalization. Could be done. There were efforts. They
weren't strong enough to carry it through so let's help them become strong enough to
carry it through. Okay we can do the same everywhere else. There are labor problems in the
universities, plenty of service workers exploited, adjuncts, graduate students, lots of
things that can be done everywhere we are. Everywhere we are we can organize, work together,
build parts of a cooperative society, that's where the common good overrules
personal gain. No, ain't RAND. Henry Giroux asks, in an age in which education far exceeds schooling, how can we talk about
education as being central to politics? How important is culture as a site
of struggle in the 21st century? Well the right wing certainly understands this.
They're fighting culture wars all the time. Take the United States. The radical party, the
Republican party, everywhere it has any role in the federal government or the states,
is pressing very hard for a deeply reactionary cultural policy. One of their main
targets is what's called critical race theory. None of them have a clue what critical race theory
is. If they looked into it, they probably wouldn't even understand it. But it's a slogan that was set
up to mean the great replacement. They're trying to destroy the white race, you know. We've got
to block them from teaching critical race theory, block them from teaching the history of the
vicious oppression of 400 years of repression of African- Americans and the bitter legacy it's
left. Can't teach that stuff. That's critical race theory. We got to win the culture wars. Same on
everything else. No right to abortion, traditional Christian conservative culture, in fact let's
destroy the public schools. Mass public education was one of the great contributions of the United
States to modern society, developed primarily in the United States. That was pretty democratic.
It was important. Same on the university level. The great public universities including MIT where
I was are land-grant universities. They were federally set up to provide
education for the general population. There's an ugly side. That meant exterminating
the native population but okay we'll put that in a corner for a moment. You're not supposed
to teach that either. Fortunately where I am, the University of Arizona, they do
it. Every large talk begins with an announcement that we're on the territory
stolen from the Tohono O'odham Nation which is in reservations nearby. It's our responsibility
not only to acknowledge that but to make up for it by educational programs, cultural programs
which enable them to recover somehow from the atrocities we've committed. Okay
that's at least we could do that. But the Republicans and large number of Democrats
want to kill the public education system. For people like Milton Friedman, it was one of
the highest goals. Get rid of public education. In fact, Friedman cooperated with the segregationist
movements in the 70s. Segregationist movements recognized white supremacist movements that
with federally mandated ending to segregation, they could save segregated schooling by putting
it under some other rubric. Religious education, charter schools, you know something or other.
And Friedman very explicitly cooperated with the racist segregationists as part of the effort
to undermine the public education system. The Secretary of Education for Trump, Betsy
DeVos, comes from a very wealthy family, the DeVos Foundation. They are devoted to destroying
the public education system, replacing it by right-wing religious education. It was quite
open. So defund the schools, defund the state colleges and so on. So education is certainly
a terrain for popular struggle. We shouldn't give it away to the right wing. Now the question
says "in which education far exceeds schooling". I think that should be question
two. What kind of education? The kind of education that
says you don't look at books? The kind of education that says you train for
a test? This was ridiculed in the 18th century by the Enlightenment. Ridiculing the worst
kind of education which they compared with pouring water into a vessel and then
the student poured some of it out. We've all had that experience. Taking some course
that we didn't care about, studying for the exam, getting good marks, two weeks later
forgetting what the course was about. That's institutionalized in the United States
under the first Bush and Obama administrations. It's called teaching to test. The worst imaginable
form of education. Get the students to pass a test and then grade the school on the tests so if
the tests aren't high enough, defund the school, reduce the teacher's salary. You
have teachers, I've talked to them, a kid comes up after class and says you brought up
something interesting, I'd like to pursue it, what can I do? The teacher has to say no sorry you have
to study for that test, to pass the test. This is Massachusetts, it's a liberal state. You got to
pass the test. The teacher doesn't say it but in the back of her mind is my salary
depends on it, school funding depends on it, so don't pursue what you're interested in, study
for the test and then two weeks later forget what the course was about. That's teaching to test.
That's another way to destroy education. One thing that's happened strikingly is that literacy
has sharply declined. There are measures of that. I don't know about Canada but in the
United States there have been studies. The kind of novels let's say that used to
be assigned in eighth grade are now assigned to seniors in high school because literacy
has declined. Reading ability has declined. And that's education. Well of course it varies.
If you're in a rich community. it's fine. Property taxes pay for decent schools, maybe have fairly
decent programs. You know pure pork school funding in the United States is based on property taxes.
Back in the 19th century, that didn't matter so much, the populations were mixed. Now it matters
enormously with radically segregated populations. The rich pay higher property taxes. They get
services, schools, so on. Not in the urban areas. So when we talk about education and culture as a
site of struggle there's a lot to do. Quite a lot. Maybe our last question should be the one from
William Patton. Is system change the only solution or is transformation of individual behaviour
also the solution? Or is it one or the other? So do we have to start with the system or can
individuals change themselves essentially? Why either or? You can do both. You can
take a look at the major popular movements. Take say the Vietnam anti-war movement
which I happen to be very much involved with. We tried to start the movement when John
F Kennedy, one of the major modern criminals, sharply escalated the war in the early
1960s. Nobody cared. Barely reported. But a few of us, there were people around us, said
look it's time to try to organize some opposition to this massive atrocity. We started meeting
in a living room with a couple of neighbours. Maybe you could get to a church where 10 people
would show up. Long struggle Finally it got big changes. That's the way everything works. Take the
civil rights movement. It really took off in 1960 when four black students whose name nobody
remembers sat in a segregated lunch counter in North Carolina, Greensboro. Of course,
immediately arrested, thrown in jail, could have been the end. Except the next day a couple
more black students came, then more, after a while you had some students coming down from the north,
pretty soon you got SNCC and the freedom riders. After a while you had mass demonstrations, Martin
Luther King, you had some institutional changes. Nowhere near enough but some and that's the
way everything works. If we're going to have worker participation or control over enterprises,
first it's a matter of consciousness raising. You go back to the women's movement,
how did it begin in the 60s? A group of young kids would get together
and talk to each other and say look we don't have to live like this, we don't have to
be the servants who serve the coffee, you know, we can take part in things. That was a
big breakthrough. It wasn't easy to do. Take the labor movement. You go back to
when we had a vibrant labor movement, late 19th early 20th century. slogan of the
labor movement mass labor movement was "those who work in the mills should own them". The
idea that you should be subordinate to a master was considered an intolerable attack on your
dignity and rights. We now call that having a job. Well that consciousness can be revived. I don't
think it's much below the surface. It takes work. Change of attitudes, change of what
Gramsci called hegemonic common sense, cut it away, change it, along with outcome
institutional changes. They're mutually supportive. You set up a cooperative, gets
people to think about how you can work together. In order to set up the cooperative, you have to
get people to think yeah we'd like to cooperate. So they're mutually reinforcing. I
don't think it's one or the other. Thank you and thank you so much for being with
us tonight. We're greatly honoured to have you with us and it's been just a marvelous evening,
deeply illuminating. I would recommend everyone read The Precipice and the many other books that
Noam Chomsky has brought out. It'll give you unrivaled insights into the world in which
we're living and may I say a sense of hope, a tremendous sense of the principle
of hope that can really inspire us and keep us going, so thank you very much Dr.
Chomsky. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. Thank you very much, this is Henry Giroux.
I just want to say I'm really honoured, I'm privileged to have you here tonight. I think
that every time I hear you, my faith in what it means to change consciousness is beginning
to change enter into politics becomes more solidified and more amplified. And I want to thank
you for your work and thank you for your presence.
